Julie Dawson

Julie Dawson is a doctoral candidate at the University of Vienna’s Institute for Contemporary History. She previously studied at Columbia University, the Vilnius Yiddish Institute, and Northwestern University. Her dissertation examines postwar Jewish life in Romania through the lens of recently found German-language diaries of a Transnistrian survivor. Dawson has worked extensively in and with Romanian archival repositories, directing the Leo Baeck Institute’s archival survey of Transylvania and Bukovina (jbat.lbi.org) from 2012 to 2019. From 2016 to 2019 she was researcher-in-residence at the Mediaș synagogue (Romania) for the EU Horizon 2020 project TRACES: Transmitting Contentious Cultural Heritages with the Arts. She held a Fortunoff Fellowship at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute from 2020-2021 and currently holds a doctoral grant from the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah (2022-2024). She is co-editor with Marianne Windsberger of Precarious Archives, Precarious Voices: Expanding Jewish Narratives from the Margins, a special issue of the journal S.I.M.O.N. – Shoah: Intervention. Methods. Documentation. She has published in, amongst others, European Holocaust Studies Vol. 3: Places, Spaces and Voids in the Holocaust and Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History. Her research interests include Jewish Bukovina, communist Romania, women’s history, trauma and memory studies.